Refinements and Changes

Compile

In Compile, it is now possible to turn off the preservation of centred text when formatting is overridden on a section-by-section basis. It is also possible to tell Scrivener to preserve tabs and indents in a Section Layout that otherwise overrides the text formatting. Both of these options are available via the new paintbrush icon at the bottom of the Section Layouts pane.

Removed “Hide section in ebook” Section Layout Compile option for Kindle format, because the Kindle currently ignores this ebook option.

Added <$sectionParentTitle> placeholder for headers and footers. This is the same as <$sectiontitle> but outputs the title of the parent document for the page group.

Compile will now flag up when formats have the same internal ID (which can cause issues). This could be caused by a Time Machine restore or by copying formats manually in the Application Support folder, and is not likely to occur often. A warning icon is shown for problematic formats and a “Fix Duplicate IDs” option appears in the contextual and gear menus when this condition exists.

Editing

Text completions and emojis can now be added to Scrivener’s main editor Touch Bar.

“Heading” and “Title” paragraph styles now use Keep-with-Next by default in new projects.

The Format Bar can now show fractions in font sizes.

Added a “Reload from Original Image” option to the contextual menu of linked images in text.

Collapsed footnotes and comments in the Inspector now use an icon rather than text to indicate their type, allowing more room for the comment text preview.

Media Files and Web Pages

When viewing audio files, the playback controls no longer fade out but remain visible.

Added ability to insert the current media’s file stamp in the focussed editor (Insert > Media Time Stamp). To do so, you need the editor to be split and for it to be showing a sound or video file in one editor with the focus in the text in the other.

Added “Allow limited navigation in web pages” option to Navigation Preferences. When ticked, you can navigate around imported web pages to some degree, and the contextual menu allows you to navigate back and forward. Note that Scrivener is not a dedicated web browser, however.

You can also now hold down Option when clicking a link in a web page to open it inside Scrivener’s browser.

When Scrivener resolves an alias file, if that file is on a volume that is not mounted, Scrivener no longer tries to mount the volume, which could lead to long lock-ups as macOS tried to access the volume.

Script Writing

Added “Paste Plain Text as Screenplay” to the “Edit” menu (only available when a script document has the focus in the editor). This attempts to convert any plain text on the pasteboard to screenplay format, allowing for easier pastes from Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter.

In Scriptwriting mode, the “General Text (Centered)” pop-up menu shortcut is now “E” rather than “C”, which clashed with the shortcut for “Character”.

It is now possible to set script mode to insert text at the start of a line when hitting tab (under the Tab/Return area of Script Settings).

Added 1.2 line spacing as an option to Script Settings.

Added a new <$mediaPlaybackTime> placeholder that can only be used inside the tab “Insert” fields of Script Settings. This can be used to automatically insert the current playback time of a video or sound file in the other editor by simply hitting tab.

Added a new “Transcript” script format that takes advantage of the new time stamp placeholder, intended for use while working with a video or sound file in the other editor.

Statistics

Project Statistics now show the average, longest and shortest document lengths.

Added “Show allowance in progress bar” option to document target settings. When ticked, the overflow allowance is shown in the right side of the bar.

Other Changes

Added an option to the “Behaviors” Preferences to turn off 3.0’s new behaviour of deleting text dragged out of the editor to other areas of the project.

Added an option to exclude the screenshot when tweeting Project Targets (“Include screenshot when using Twitter service in Project Targets”, available in the General > Services area of Preferences).

In the binder contextual menu, “Move to Trash” is now replaced with “Delete” for items contained inside the Trash folder.

It’s now possible to permanently delete a trashed document from a collection or search.

Bugs Fixed

Major (Stability)

Fixed bug that could cause hang in referenced auto-numbers.

Fixed bug whereby an exception could be thrown if using macOS full screen with Composition mode and trying to close the project using the close button in the main window.

Fixed bug whereby if formatting was applied to multiple sections in Scrivenings mode, if any sections were identical, the formatting would only be saved for the first of the identical sections.

Hopefully fixed crash relating to displaying unknown file types.

Fixed a bug whereby the “Author” attribute in the Scrivener project’s XML could include invalid XML characters, causing the iOS version not to be able to read the project.

Fixed error that could be thrown on restoring Quick Reference panel tabs when launching Scrivener.

Fixed a rare bug that could cause a hang when exporting to Word.

Fixed bug whereby an edited custom metadata value could be lost on autosave.

Fixed bug whereby dragging comments or footnotes while editing them could cause the note text to be replaced with that of another comment or footnote.

Minor (Usability)

When opening Scrivener directly from the install DMG, Scrivener once more asks if you want to move Scrivener to the Applications directory. (This had been broken by recent quarantining behaviour on macOS for downloaded files.)

Fixed bug whereby Select Similar Formatting did not work consistently with text just typed compared to text saved and reloaded.

Refinements and Changes

Compile

When Compile is set to convert plain text spacing, the conversion now applies to the Compile formatting rather than the original editor formatting.

Compile’s convert MMD to rich text option now works for items outside the Draft folder included using the <$include> tag.

Compile now retains typographical small caps.

Added a “Table of Contents” Section Layout to the Ebook Compile format.

Rich text to MultiMarkdown now converts paragraphs with an HTML header level set to a Markdown header.

Section Layout previews now show images inserted using the <$img> tag.

Titles updated in links during Compile now have Markdown converted if the option to convert Markdown in titles is ticked.

Improved image identifiers in ebook HTML and made it easier to override styles in CSS using auto-generated class names (Scrivener no longer avoids assigning CSS names that clash with those in the custom CSS).

If “Add ‘first-letter’ span style to first letter” is ticked for any Section Layouts, if there is a “First Letter” character style defined, it is now included in ebook CSS even if it is not used anywhere else in the text.

ePub 3 and KF8 now support underlines without needing to use styles.

ePub 3 and KF8 now support the “Transformations” options pane for converting italics to underlines (and vice versa) and converting smart punctuation to dumb punctuation.

<$pageGroupTitle> replaces <$sectiontitle> to avoid terminological confusion with Section Types and Section Layouts (<$sectiontitle> will continue to work too, though).

“Convert titles to rich text in titles and synopses” now works properly when <$sectiontitle> / <$pageGroupTitle> is used with titles containing synopses for RTF, .docs and other rich text formats, including PDF and print.

When using the <$img> plageholder tag, you can now set percentage widths for ePub 3 and KF8 ebooks, using a new “ebook” setting. If present, this will override the “w” and “h” tags for ebooks. E.g. <$img:Img Doc;w=400;ebook=50%> - this sets the width to 50% for ePub 3 and Kindle KF8, and to 400pt for all other formats.

Editing

Added Transformations > Remove Small Caps.

Tabbed windows are now restored when Scrivener is re-launched (and Quick Reference panels remember their tabbed states per-project).

“Open Document Link in” now appears at the top of the editor contextual menu when Ctrl-clicking on a document link.

When loading a Copyholder by Option-dropping, if you hold down Option at the start of the drag in the binder, the Copyholder will now get the focus. (Only hold down Option on drop to leave the focus as it was.)

Format > Paragraph > Increase/Decrease Indents now shows the keyboard shortcuts for Increase Indents and Decrease Indents (these previously did not show up because they are identical to the ones for Edit > Move > Move Left and Move Right).

Either Option or Command can now be used to open comments in a popover instead of the Inspector, since Option-clicks do not work on all systems (e.g. 10.12).

“Capitalize words automatically” in the macOS System Preferences (under Keyboard > Text) no longer has any effect on Scrivener’s main editor. (Previously, turning this option on would cause Scrivener to auto-capitalise sentences even if the auto-caps options were turned off in Scrivener’s Preferences.)

Straighten smart quotes will now work on English quotes even if the System Preferences are set to use straight quotes instead of smart quotes.

Auto-capitalisation is no longer triggered after “i.e.” Or “e.g.”.

Styles with colours now work better with Revision Mode.

Applying a style with a colour to a paragraph containing any colours now applies the style’s colour to uncoloured text.

Fixed minor bug whereby a legitimate open quotation mark after a hyphen or dash could become a close quote.

Added option to turn off border to current line highlight.

Lists menu and format bar popup now indicate which list type is currently selected (if any).

The first, left tab is no longer added when using Copy Special > Copy Documents as ToC, thus avoiding problems whereby the page number may not be positioned correctly after short titles.

Improved Accessibility support in the main editor, which should now work fine with VoiceOver’s Ctrl-Opt-J shortcut in fixed width and page view modes.

Themes

If any Preferences Themes are saved, a “Themes” submenu now appears in the “Scrivener” menu, allowing you to switch between themes more easily.

There are now more options available when saving a Preferences theme. It is now possible, for instance, to save a theme that only affects Composition mode colours, or a theme that affects everything else except Composition mode colours.

Updated “Manage…” menu of Preferences so that it is now possible to delete themes and presets from the menu.

Miscellaneous

An icon is now associated with the .scrformat (Compile Format) file type.

When importing e.g. via “Save PDF to Scrivener”, the imported document is now displayed in the editor.

Full width labels in the binder no longer span the entire width of the binder but are indented and more like the Scrivener 2 labels.

When Ctrl-clicking on the Trash folder in the binder, a minimal menu is now shown that includes “Empty Trash…”.

You can no longer change Section Types for the Draft, Research and Trash folders (which had no effect anyway - you can still change the subdocument types, though).

When opening the tutorial project, Scrivener will now prompt you to update it if there is a newer version of the tutorial available. (This will take effect for future tutorial updates.)

Added a “Convert Markdown” option to Import & Split, which converts all Markdown to rich text for the imported documents.

When a group higher up the hierarchy determines the “Structure-Based” Section Type via its “Default Subdocument Type” setting, this is now indicated in brackets after “Structure-Based” in the menu.

Double-clicking the divider beneath the index card in the Inspector now changes the ratio of the card to 6x4 rather than 5x3, 6x4 being the new default ratio for cards in Scrivener 3.

It is now possible to make the main window narrower when there is not a vertical split.

Added a progress spinner to “Save As Template” sheet.

Linguistic focus now supports Spanish-style dialogue. (Spanish-style dialogue is assumed by default on Spanish systems, but the behaviour can be turned on or off via the General > Language area of Preferences.)

Hitting return in the search field now re-runs the search without needing to re-type anything.

Added instructions to the Novel, Novel (with Parts) and General Non-Fiction templates for adding a custom table of contents to ebooks.

Added “Always set title of new items” Preference to “Behaviors”. If turned on, this restores the 2.x behaviour of having the focus moved to the binder to name an item whenever a new item is created.

On macOS 10.13, Scrivener now uses the Contacts framework instead of the AddressBook framework for populating title pages.

Updated the “Float Quick Reference Panels” keyboard shortcut so that it no longer conflicts with High Sierra’s lock screen shortcut.

Bugs Fixed

Major (Stability)

Hopefully fixed a bug whereby Scrivener would crash with a code-signing error for some users.

Hopefully fixed a bug whereby Scrivener would crash trying to open some projects on 10.13.

Fixed bug whereby linguistic focus would crash if the editor used a texture background.

Fixed bug whereby “Save As Template” UI could get stuck and require a Force Quit.

Minor (Usability)

Fixed bug whereby changing binder font in Preferences (and certain other fonts) would result in a Helvetica font regardless when selecting certain fonts.

Fixed bug whereby word frequency for multiple documents would conflate the last word of one document and the first word of the next.

Fixed bug with numbers in the line numbering ruler drawing over each other when counting lines in tables.

Fixed bug whereby Layouts would hide line numbering ruler.

Fixed minor bug with the index card in the Inspector appearing the wrong default height in new projects.

Fixed bug whereby script mode could reset as you started typing if script mode was enabled by selecting a script type from the lower part of the Scriptwriting menu rather than by selecting “Script Mode”.

The last version of Scrivener 2, capable of being run on Intel hardware from Mac OS X 10.9 to macOS 10.12 “Sierra”. If you purchased from Apple’s Mac App Store, you will need to use their App Store software to download Scrivener, by clicking on the Purchases tab and finding Scrivener in the list.

If you are running an older operating system than 10.9 (we support back to 10.4 “Tiger”), or are using a PowerPC Mac, you will need to download this version of Scrivener. Some on 10.6 may also find Scrivener 2.9 acceptable, but if you use PDF in the editors or wish to make use of Fountain you should use this version instead.